Cockroaches Are His Friends

When he got off the train at Pennsylvania Station to come home for winter break, coat pockets stuffed with beetles and giant cockroaches, he did not go see his girlfriend on the Upper East Side or his parents in the Bronx. He headed straight for the nearest Petland.

The next day, just before Christmas, Mr. Rodriques, 26, sat in his childhood bedroom, surrounded by glass tanks, and reflected on his metamorphosis from isolated bug nerd to minicelebrity and fledgling ambassador for the creepy and crawly, performing regular show-and-tells at art spaces and schools.

“Every major event in my life,” he said, “has been around insects.”

Mr. Rodriques sat at his childhood desk with a wide horn hissing cockroach crawling across the front of his shirt and a death’s head cockroach, momentarily forgotten, somewhere on his back. The wide horn is three and a half inches long, with a lustrous, lacquered-wood-looking exoskeleton that appears to be wearing an oversized black frog mask. The bulging “eyes” are his horns. He said he used them “sort of like a ram would use its horns” to fight other males over territory. “They’re a lot more mammalian than we give them credit for.”

At a visitor’s request, Mr. Rodriques took out a few tobacco hornworms — gaudy, gorgeous, ridiculous creatures, turquoise and green with false eyes along their bodies and false horns on their rear ends. In pet stores, they are sold as food for leopard geckos. “I feel like these are too precious to keep as feeders,” he said. He has a leopard gecko, but feeds it only crickets and waxworms.

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An introduction to two of the species that Aaron Rodriques prizes for their gentle ways, beauty and sophistication.CreditCreditElias Williams for The New York Times

Mr. Rodriques wrote his master’s thesis at New York University about hornworms. “They have an amazing defense where they collect the nicotine found in the tobacco they eat and exhale it as a gas to scare away predators.” But they are also his friends. “If I’m feeling stressed out, I might take one out and they’ll calm me down,” he said.

A gentle, quiet man with a bushy Afro, Mr. Rodriques marks his life by the bugs he has loved. When he was 4, he would scoop up pavement ants in front of his house and keep them in jars. “They looked like a weird combination of robots and aliens,” he said.

When he was 6, his family moved to their current home, on a cul-de-sac near the end of the 5 train. Its modest backyard contained a wealth of beetles. “I was on beetles for a long time,” Mr. Rodriques said. In third grade, he brought in a cockchafer beetle grub for show-and-tell, hoping to impress his classmates. “They were just completely apathetic,” he recalled.

When he was 7, Mr. Rodriques’s house got infested with German cockroaches, the common household scourge. “I tried to make them pets,” he said.

His parents — a nurse and a security guard who came to New York from Jamaica — encouraged his passion, except for the German cockroach episode. His peers remained unimpressed.

“I was alone for the vast majority of school,” he said.

Adolescence brought a deeper interest in larvae. “For me, one of the highlights of high school was staring at mealworms,” he said.

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Mr. Rodriques with some of his tobacco hornworms.CreditElias Williams for The New York Times

In 2015, he saw on Facebook that a band called Moth Eggs was playing at Bohemian Grove in Brooklyn. “I posted that I’m going to go because I breed moths and I like their name,” he said. The woman who programs a space called the Tarot Society saw his post and asked him to do a show, he said.

There have been mishaps along the way. At a performance and hands-on session in Brooklyn, an audience member dropped Maximillion. A couple of days later, he began leaking dark fluid and died. Mr. Rodriques said he cried, just as he had when he lost his twig mantis, his pink toe tarantula and Mr. Crabs the blue land crab.

Bugs, it turns out, have a lot to teach us about empathy and difference. And Mr. Rodriques believes they can help fight xenophobia. “When you change your thought process from seeing something and being afraid of it, to seeing it and not knowing what it is and then learning more about it, that spills over into other avenues,” he said.

On Monday, Mr. Rodriques will head back to Purdue University to resume his doctoral research on the seductively sweet tergal secretions of German cockroaches. (“The male secretes it, she eats it, and while she eats it, he’ll mate with her.”)

Eventually, he hopes to conduct research on the lesser marsh grasshopper, which lives near Chernobyl and seems to thrive on radiation. Learning why, he said, could lead to medicines to ease the side effects of chemotherapy.

He has other goals, too.

“I would also like to make giant insects,” he said. Bigger creatures would make better study specimens for students. He thought for a second. “Maybe like a 24-inch tarantula.”